mark nottingham

Travel Warning

Thursday, 17 March 2005

I personally like Airbus planes, especially the A340, but Risks Digest has given me a reason to avoid some of them;

[A]fter (an earlier) disaster, more than 20 American Airlines A300 pilots asked to be transferred to Boeings, although this meant months of retraining and loss of earnings. Some of those who contributed to pilots’ bulletin boards last week expressed anger at the European manufacturer in vehement terms. One wrote that having attended an Airbus briefing…, he had refused to let any of his family take an A300 or A310 and had paid extra to take a circuitous route on holiday purely to avoid them: ‘That is how convinced I am that there are significant problems associated with these aircraft.’

If you read the entire article, you’ll see that, basically, the tails are failling off of A300s and A310s. So, if you happen to fly a fair amount, you might want to pay more attention to that “equipment” column in the reservations system.

Luckily, United doesn’t seem to have any of these in its fleet, so most of my flights are OK (in this regard, at least.)